It Takes Guts
EPISODE 042: IT TAKES GUTS
Aside from all the other voices we listen to, and the screaming rationality of our brains, there is a part of us that begs to be listened to and considered more carefully: the gut. I don’t know if it’s a kind of pre-rational thinking or if it’s instinct, but it’s got it’s finger on the pulse of what makes us distinctly us and we ignore it to our peril. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
It was exactly a year ago this week that I hit publish on episode one of A Beautiful Anarchy, a half-baked idea for a podcast created by a guy who himself doesn’t listen to podcasts. That part didn’t scare me, after all, I’d just spent the last 10 years creating eBooks for photographers as a guy who doesn’t read eBooks. The only reason that apparent misalignment didn’t disqualify me from doing either successfully is that I knew I wasn’t in the eBook business. And I’m not now in the podcast business. I’m not remotely passionate or even particularly knowledgable about digital PDFs or microphones and podcast apps. Those are merely methods of delivery for the things I am passionate about: living a life of creativity, and helping others to do the same with freedom, new perspectives, and on my better days, maybe even wisdom. Both of these ventures - the eBooks and this podcast - came to me out of the blue, perfect ideas only in need of execution, and both have generated more money and social media followers than I could ever imagine.
I’m just kidding. No, each of these creative endeavours has been another wildly exciting step towards my on-going pursuit of global obscurity and the idea that I will be happiest when I’m being creative and making things, most of all making a difference in the world and though I can do that in many different ways, I can probably do it best by doing things that I alone can do in the way that I do them. But mostly? I’m just trying to listen to my gut.
My ideas concerning what I want to do when I grow up, and I’ve had several over the years, have always evolved slowly, and not one of them has had its true genesis in the part of my brain that thinks clever, perfectly-formed thoughts, but in the part of my brain we often just call the gut. When I was 18 I followed my gut to not one but two theology schools, contrary to my mother’s concerns about me joining a cult and her admonition to stay away from the Kool-Aid. I left those schools, not just a little disillusioned, and became a comedian. Not exactly the pride of the alma mater, but I was following my gut. I left that career eventually too, following an idea that I could be a humanitarian photographer, which I did, but not because I had thought it out or carefully followed the 10 steps laid out in the Dummies Guide to Careers that Don’t Really Exist, but because my gut told me to.
When I look back at it, every significant decision I’ve ever made - for better or worse - has involved a level of attention, or at times, willful disobedience, to my gut. What’s that got to do with a life of everyday creativity? I’m David duChemin and this is episode 042 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let’s talk about it.
Intro / Music
Any truly creative thing, whether that’s making something new, exploring ideas that feel counter-intuitive or harder still, counter-cultural–or just sharing the results of that creativity with the world–takes guts, which is one of the few metaphors I’m just going to leave alone without exploring it too much because most of the time my guts are full of…well, you know. And I’m not even going to search Google for the origins of why we talk about trusting our guts because I don’t want Amazon and Facebook serving me up ads for products aimed at my intestinal health for the next 3 months.
I do know this: there’s a lot going on in my gut, and from here on I’m talking about the metaphorical gut, the one we trust, or don’t; the part of ourselves that carries what feels like a deeper wisdom, one more in touch with not only how we think the things we do, but why. The part of us that is more linked to our personality and our whims, and knows when an idea, whether it’s good or otherwise, is a fit for us. The part where all our thoughts and memories go to spend time together and once in a while toss an idea back up into the more conscious and rational part of ourselves. Those ideas usually come with a note that says, “Hey, I’ve got an idea! what if we…?” and we often have no idea where it came from but we ignore it to our peril.
The gut is not an irrational part of ourselves, nor is listening to it necessarily an irrational act, ignoring all reason, but it might just be PRE-rational, and by that I mean there are different ways of thinking and perceiving the world and just maybe our gut is there to keep us connected to a deeper kind of thinking, one that’s not just in charge of deciding if ideas are good or bad and how we’re going to pull them off, if at all, but whether they’re good or bad for us. And we need to have a sense of that before we decide whether to hand those ideas over to the rational part of ourselves to figure them out more completely.
I think our gut has access to information that doesn’t appear on the checklists our more rational, conscious minds, used to parse out the pros and cons of new ideas. I’m not sure it’s instinct but it sure feels like it and I think the longer we live the greater the chance that instinct is particularly honed to the whole complex package of who we are and what we’re good at, and what path is the best fit for us, that it is to our creative peril that we don’t listen to it and listen well.
I’m winging this one, folks, and I’m thinking out loud here, but what if the reason we don’t listen to our guts when some new bold idea or whim bubbles to the surface, is because we’re expecting the gut to do ALL the work? For those gut-born ideas to arrive complete with plans and a step-by-step on getting them done?
What if there are two parts of the brain, and I don’t mean this scientifically, but more experientially, what if the part of the brain responsible for the best raw ideas, the curiosity, and the whims - the part that’s in charge of doing the stuff for which we alone are uniquely suited and by which we get most excited - what if that part isn’t in charge of being realistic, or listening to reason or whatever other thing we tell ourselves to talk ourselves out of what might just be the best and boldest work of our lives? The work that is most us?
What if that part of us we call our gut is there to make the sparks, or to be the internal compass that somehow just knows where the magnetic north of our creative efforts is, and it’s up to the other parts, the screaming rationality that has a million reasons why we shouldn’t be heading north to begin with, to sort out the plan for getting there? That’s what I mean when I say I suspect our gut-level thinking is pre-rational.
That would explain why the more rational part of us often wants just to shit-can the gut-born ideas in the first place, why it’s always got 20 reasons why that new idea might not work before it even does the harder thinking to come up with 20 ways it could work? It would explain the fears, too, because it’s that part of the brain that’s on the hook for solving the problems and doing the hard work of making those ideas actually happen, and if our rational side can just shoot down the ideas and urges that come from our gut before they even get off the ground, it can avoid the work, and the possibility of failure.
The job of coming up with new ideas, and the job of making them reality are two very different tasks in the creative life, and confusing the two leads to a whole mess of problems. There is a place for starting a thing and being messy about it, and exploring the many possibilities and directions, and there is a place for refining and focusing. There is a time to write and a time to edit and re-write, and those times are not the same, must not be the same, because they access, if not different parts of the brain, then different ways of thinking. Different processes. It’s why Hemingway so famously said “write drunk but edit sober.” Despite his reputation as a hard-drinker, he was not being literal. He was saying write with your gut, edit with your brain. Don’t think so damn hard when you’re just getting the ideas out because that serious rational thinking isn’t in charge of that part of things.
You can’t make a plan for an idea you never allow out to begin with, and the part of the brain that wants to deal with strategy and practicalities is not the same part of the brain that just wants to make or do some new thing just because it would feel good, because you’re dying to see where it might lead, or because there’s a fire in your belly that won’t go away until you try.
That serious and rational part of your brain is not motivated by the instinct to do what it takes to make your dreams work, but by the instinct to do what it takes to be sure you do not fail, and the fastest way, the guaranteed way, to not fail, is to not try. If your brain is like mine, it takes time for that part of the brain to shift priorities from “not failing” to “succeeding” because those aren’t necessarily that same thing. Decisions made while the brain is focused on not failing, rather than on succeeding, which takes infinitely more creative effort and problem solving, are the reason so many of us never listen to our gut.
It’s not that we don’t hear, it’s that we too quickly run them through a filter concerned about practicality, or risk-management, time, money, hard work, or any of the other reasons we don’t like to rise to a challenge or try something new and uncertain. And when it comes to our creative lives SO much of what we do isn’t practical and it does involve risk and hard work and no guarantee of success and perhaps our gut makes the better initial filter to run things through than one concerned more with not-failing and less with accomplishing something astonishing.
But the gut isn’t always right. Creative thinking is the counter-intuitive task of pushing pause, and looking at things from all angles and neither relying on the first gut-level impression, nor all the rational stuff, but on both, each doing their job.
I guess what I’m saying is it’s not one or the other but a partnership between 2 parts of our brains or two parts of the decision-making process. One is more emotional, one more rational and each have their role. That’s my caveat, my reluctant concession that the gut isn’t everything. It’s not the only voice. But it’s probably the one you listen to least, the one you need to learn to trust more, and the one you’re more likely to regret when you ignore it too quickly.
Because our guts aren’t in charge of logistics they're free to dream big, to dream of ways of bringing all our talents and desires and areas of experience, the things we love and value and enjoy, free to bring all those things together into the kind of “What If?” ideas you probably have more often than you know. Or maybe you know exactly how often you have them because they’re so frequently accompanied by the ache of saying no to them, of editing them down to their safest version, of choosing practicality so quickly you never give them a chance to ask not how should you, or how must you, do this, but how could you? Ann Why Not? What if you did it your way?
One thing's for sure: you can’t know the answer to that until you try. And sure, you might prevent yourself from failing if you put the screws on the idea quickly enough, but you’ll also prevent yourself from succeeding, from thriving, from seeing those big dreams become something bigger than you could have imagined.
I’ve ignored my gut too. I’ve walked stubbornly into situations I knew were not aligned with who I really am. I’ve ignored my dreams and settled for less. I’ve walked into things I should have walked past and stuck things out when I should have cut and run. I can’t for the life of me think of a time I’ve ignored that voice from deep-down and not been left with something like regret for not having trusted my instincts.
Listen to your gut. Don’t listen only to your gut. It’s not the gut's job to figure out how to make something happen, it’s not the guts job to refine your ideas and make a plan and stick to it. But there is a part of you that holds bigger dreams and deeper wisdom, a part of you that keeps all those frustrated childhood longings, incomplete ideas that still beg for resolution, areas in which you have settled for less.
There’s a part of you that probably doesn’t look rational at first, that struggles to express your ideas and so gets dismissed too quickly. When your gut speaks it’s part of you begging to be heard and it’s relying on you to listen long enough that you can get past the need to make perfect sense of it, to play it safe, and for ideas and urges to come into the world with an effortless step-by-step plan. It’s relying on you to give it a chance for just long enough that the more creative and rational parts of you have a chance to explore it, to find a way to get past the obvious objections and to do anything other than ignore it. Sometimes what our gut wants most of all is that we not surrender so easily. That we fight for it and don’t give up the moment it gets hard; that we just fucking try.
That’s where the greatest joys are found. In the trying. We all want to be heard, and though it seems strange to say it, sometimes the one we long most to listen to us is ourselves. To stand up for ourselves, not only with others but against the voices inside us that want us to be safe, to be comfortable. Is it a coincidence, I wonder, that when we speak to someone who really listens, without rushing to judgement, and we feel free to be completely honest and ourselves we call it spilling our guts? And isn’t it time we did so?
All art begins with listening to yourself, to your gut. Not necessarily obeying, but listening attentively, and trusting when it feels right to do so. And though I can’t back this up with anything more than my own gut, it seems to me if you want your art to touch people in the deeper places - in their heart or their gut or the places in their minds where poetry and imagination and the longing for something more reside - then it’s got to start there for you too. Art isn’t always practical, but it is always personal. It doesn’t have to be rational right out of the gate, but it does have to feel right.
Thanks so much for joining me today. If you’re only just discovering A Beautiful Anarchy I post new episodes 3 out of every 4 weeks but there’s no reason you should take a break on those 4th weeks so I‘d like to send you a monthly issue of On The Make which is basically an email version of A Beautiful Anarchy and you can get it by going to StartUglyBook.com, scrolling to the bottom and telling me where to send it. At the same time I’ll also send you a copy of my eBook Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back, and once a month I’ll draw the name of one reader to whom I’ll send a signed copy of one of my books.
Thanks again for being part of this. If you’d like to get in touch with me, with feedback, questions or ideas you’d like to see explored in a future episode, I’d love to hear from you and you can email me at talkback@aBeautifulAnarchy.com Until next time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0